Tag: police state

Germany Says It Will Have To BAN DRIVING At Weekends To Meet Net Zero Targets

The German transport minister has declared that he will have to enforce a complete ban on driving at weekends throughout the country in order to comply with current climate ‘net zero’ laws.

Yes, really.

Volker Wissing has suggested changing the law to exclude the transport sector from carbon emissions reduction targets for now, because it is basically impossible without outlawing people getting in their cars.

Wissing has stated that the law needs to be changed before mid-July, otherwise he has no choice but to take the drastic action.

In a letter to coalition parliamentary group leaders, Wissing wrote “A corresponding reduction in traffic performance would only be possible through restrictive measures that are difficult to communicate to the population, such as nationwide and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays.”

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Behind the Badge: In New York City Homeless Shelters, the Same ‘Peace Officers’ Abuse Residents

In April 2018, at a New York City intake center for homeless families, Melina Cardona and five other city employees handcuffed a woman who had just walked in to get information about emergency housing. They applied the cuffs in a manner “so excessive,” they fractured her arm.

At the time, Cardona was a peace officer with the New York City Department of Homeless Services Police, an obscure, approximately 700-member agency that maintains security throughout the shelters the city owns and operates. Department of Homeless Services (DHS) officers “work with New York City’s most vulnerable population,” as a former deputy commissioner said in a recent recruitment video.

They are “the original community police officers.”

Although DHS’s peace officers are given broad powers, they are not police officers. They carry non-lethal weapons such as pepper spray, batons, and Tasers, and they are given the power to detain, not arrest. Nevertheless, they have been training with the NYPD since 2017.

And peace officers still have the ability to mistreat the people they are employed to protect. An investigation by a team of journalists reporting for MuckRock and New York Focus offers a first-of-its-kind look at how these officers are held accountable — and how long their behavior can go unchecked. Previously-unreleased disciplinary files show that it often takes DHS a half a year or more to suspend officers found guilty of misconduct. Those who do land a timely suspension tend to be back at work within a month.

If they’ve done it once, they’re likely to do it twice: Through public records requests, MuckRock and New York Focus uncovered disciplinary incidents involving 31 officers, many of them repeat offenders. Just three officers were involved in more than a third of all incidents.

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NSA “Just Days Away From Taking Over The Internet” Warns Ed Snowden

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is only days away from “taking over the internet” with a massive expansion of its surveillance powers, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In an April 16 post to X, Snowden drew attention to a thread originally posted by Elizabeth Goitein — the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice — that warned of a new bill that could see the U.S. government surveillance powers amplified to new levels.

Source: Edward Snowden

The bill in question reforms and extends a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702.

Currently, the NSA can force internet service providers such as Google and Verizon to hand over sensitive data concerning NSA targets.

However, Goitein claims that through an “innocuous change” to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” in the FISA 702 bill, the U.S. government could go far beyond its current scope and force nearly every company and individual that provides any internet-related service to assist with NSA surveillance.

“That sweeps in an enormous range of U.S. businesses that provide wifi to their customers and therefore have access to equipment on which communications transit. Barber shops, laundromats, fitness centers, hardware stores, dentist’s offices.”

Additionally, the people forced to hand over data would be unable to discuss the information provided due to hefty gag order penalties and conditions outlined in the bill, added Goitein.

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After Virginia GOP Governor’s Marijuana Veto, Democratic Senators Say Legal Sales Likely Won’t Happen Until 2027 Or Later

Democratic senators in support of legal marijuana sales in Virginia said at a recent event that in light of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) veto of a retail cannabis bill last month, it will likely be 2027 or later before adult-use shops can legally open their doors.

“I’m very direct, and sometimes folks don’t like to hear the harsh truth, but it’s the harsh truth,” said Sen. Aaron Rouse (D), who sponsored the retail sales bill in the Senate. “There’s a really big mountain to climb with this governor and his administration. I think he will veto setting up an adult cannabis market regardless of what we send him.”

“By 2027, there will be a new governor in Virginia,” added Sen. Adam Ebbin (D), who sponsored marijuana sales legislation this session and in years past. “It’s possible that after the 2025 gubernatorial election, that someone will take office in January of 2026 who would sign an adult-use marketplace bill.”

“That means that, whether it was in 2027 or thereabouts,” Ebbin continued, “we could expect to see more a regulated market for non-medical use or adult use in Virginia.”

Use, possession and limited cultivation of cannabis by adults is already legal in the commonwealth, the result of a Democrat-led proposal sponsored by Ebbin that was approved by lawmakers in 2021. But Republicans, after winning control of the House and governor’s office later that year, subsequently blocked the required reenactment of a regulatory framework for retail sales.

This year, with Democrats in control of both legislative chambers, lawmakers passed a new legal sales bill, sending it to Youngkin for his consideration in late February. A month later, the governor vetoed the bill, writing in a veto message that “the proposed legalization of retail marijuana in the Commonwealth endangers Virginians’ health and safety.”

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Alberta updates mRNA booster guidance to every three months, starting with six-month-old babies

As of Monday, Alberta Health Services (AHS) has updated its guidance on mRNA COVID-19 booster shots to every three months, beginning with six-month-old babies. 

That works out to about 320 doses for the average lifespan. 

“Starting April 15, 2024, select groups of Albertans at high risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 will be eligible for an additional dose,” AHS wrote on its website. 

According to Alberta health officials, “All vaccines are safe, effective and save lives,” and it doesn’t matter if a patient takes a COVID-19 booster before, after, or at the same time as a flu shot. 

That goes for babies as young as six months old. 

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One Hundred Years of IRS Political Targeting

One hundred years ago, Senator James Couzens, a Michigan Republican, took to the Senate floor to denounce the Bureau of Internal Revenue for abusing its power and trampling innocent taxpayers. Couzens launched a sweeping Senate investigation of federal tax collectors. One year later, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes as Couzens stepped out of the Senate chamber. Couzens fought the case, and eventually proved that he had actually overpaid his taxes by roughly one million dollars, as David Burnham noted in his 1989 classic, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. But the precedent of the IRS exploiting its power to attack its critics was firmly established.

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on political critics such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and prominent Republicans like former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944 when he spiked an IRS audit of massive illegal campaign contributions from a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s career would likely have been destroyed if Texans had learned of his dirty-dealing. Instead, LBJ survived and scores of thousands of Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died as a result.

President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and derided people “who would sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and make Americans distrust their leaders.

At a news conference a few days later, a reporter sought his views on the legality of campaign contributions supporting ”right-wing extremist groups.” Kennedy replied “As long as they meet the requirements of the tax law, I don’t think that the Federal Government can interfere or should interfere with the right of any individual to take any position he wants. The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable to—for nontaxable purposes. But that is another question, and I am sure the Internal Revenue system examines that.”

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A brief history of the “biodefence” era and how they convinced nations to give up our rights for “pandemic safety”

Dr. Meryl Nass outlines the 25-year history of the “biodefence” programme and how they generated the “national will” to give up our civil and human rights in the name of “pandemic safety.”

She also discusses how the World Health Organisation – a specialised agency of the United Nations that is concerned with international public health – has repeatedly failed to “champion health and a better future for all” over the past 20 years.

Note: “Biodefence” is enclosed in quotation marks because as Dr. Nass noted in a report published last year, under the guise of preparing their defences against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted “dual-use” – both offensive and defensive – research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms. And, employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was renamed as “gain-of-function” research.

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Georgia Independent Bookstore Sues Jail Over Policy Banning Book Shipments

A Georgia jail is refusing all books shipped to inmates, except those that come from major retailers. One local bookshop is suing, saying that policy is unconstitutional.

In May 2023, two different people visited Avid Bookshop, a progressive independent bookstore located in Athens, Georgia. Each customer purchased three books to mail to an inmate at the Gwinnett County Jail. Both packages were returned, with papers from the jail listing the reason as “Not from publisher/authorized Retailer.” The shoppers asked Avid if the store could mail the books directly.

Each time, Luis Correa, Avid’s operations manager, packaged new paperback copies of the same books and mailed them directly from the store. Aware of the jail’s stated policy that shipments “must have a packing slip or receipt stating what is in the package,” Correa included both. (Correa declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Again, the packages came back, with a sticker saying they were “not sent from publisher or authorized retailer.”

Gwinnett County’s website states that “magazines/non-local newspaper subscriptions and books will be accepted as long as they are mailed directly from the publisher or authorized retailer,” but it gives no clarification on what an authorized retailer is or how to become one.

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New EU Rule BANS Garden Bonfires

It’s now gone a few years since the British left the EU, in part because they didn’t like all the restrictions and rules that they were coming up with.

Now there is a new rule.

People will be banned from starting bonfires in their garden to burn garden waste such as grass, leafs and sticks.

This is because the new law requires that food and organic waste be sorted and recycled.

Meaning that people who are tending their garden will have to either compost their garden waster or deliver it in for recycling.

In Scandinavia it is tradition in the spring where homeowners tend their garden and start bonfires to burn up garden waste, which will now be banned.

People are now paying with microchips in their hand.

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Kansas Lawmakers Consider Proposal To Jail Farmers Who Grow Hemp With Too Much THC

State law enforcement, local prosecutors and a lobbyist convinced legalization of medical marijuana posed the greatest threat to quality of life in Kansas tried to quietly squeeze into a bill lowering fees on industrial hemp producers an amendment that could send wayward farmers to prison for years.

The threshold between freedom and incarceration under the amendment advocated by the executive director of Stand Up for Kansas, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the Kansas County and District Attorneys Association would be a laboratory test measuring whether a hemp product had a THC content greater than 1 percent. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Kansas allow harvesting, processing and marketing of hemp with less than 0.3 percent THC.

“I just need help understanding who are we going after? I hope it’s not our industrial hemp producers,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican and farmer. “Is there some place we can look to find out how much this is being abused? I’m trying to understand where all the abuse is at.”

Stand Up for Kansas leader Katie Whisman said she couldn’t document the threat posed by crooked hemp farmers. The former Kansas Bureau of Investigation administrator did say establishment of industrial hemp as a row crop in Kansas created “a lot of confusion for law enforcement” personnel. She said one source of frustration was the challenge of differentiating between legal hemp and illegal marijuana.

“They look the same,” she said. “They smell the same. Is that hemp? Is that marijuana? How do we enforce that?”

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